Thanks for the help, everyone! I'm very happy because after installing Vegas 5.0d and opening a few of my files, I discovered everything the way I originally had it. Thanks so much.

Originally posted by: adywan

Originally posted by: klokwerk
Adywan, does Vegas have a problem with the Lagarith codec? That's the one I use (since Huffy crashes my computer no matter what I do about it). I was going to be starting a major edit later in the year and I don't want to have this kind of problem. I believe I'm using one of the version 6's.

I was using Vegas 6 when i began my edit and i use the lagarith codec without any problems.
Originally posted by: Trooperman
You guessed it. This is Vegas 5.0c and I am editing directly off of the MPEG-2 DVD files. I hope Version D fixes these problems.

Yeh, i thought you might be working with MPEG2. Vegas is ok when you are working with just a couple of edits using mpeg2 but i had hell if i tried to do anything extensive then it really started playing up, the same way you mentioned. I can't remember is 5d fixed this problem though. I think you mentioned that you are working from the NTSC DVD. The problem with Vegas that it sometimes fails to remove the 2:3 pulldown correctly and can cause loads of problems. There is a way around this but you do need a lot of hard drive space. Open up the dvd files in DVD2AVI. in the "Video" tab select the field operation as "forced film", then the colour space to "RGB24", then "clip & resize"
- set the filter type to " precise bicubic" and the "video aspect" to "free" and slide the resize slider to max to show 720 x 480. now you can export your video. using something like picvideo mjpeg codec the file size will be about 30gb but could be smaller for ntsc. Now you have your 24fps film but it is split into 2gb chunks. Its a pain that this program does this. Now you can load your first chunk into Virtualdub. once you ahve done that select "append segment", select all the other chunks and import them. now you can export. just select "no audio" in the audio tab and "direct stream copy" in the video tab and export. now your video is joined so you can delete all the split chunk files.

Now open vegas and import your project. once this has done go to the project media manager. right click on your main video file in the media manager and select "replace" and swap it for you avi footage. now save the project under a different name so you still have a back up of the original mpeg2 version incase somethings gone wrong.
Now there is one thing that vegas does that is annoying. with some avi and other files it adds them as field based footage even if it is progressive. so right click on the footage in your timeline and select properties. change the field order to "progressive". check each section of video on your timeline to see if it has changed them all to progressive.

hopefully 5d will fix the problem for you so you don't have to go through all that. But to be safe for any future edits convert the mpeg2 to lossless avi first

Thanks for all that advice, Adywan. The issue was hard drive space. I thought, "Why use all that HD space for AVI files when I can edit right off of the MPEG files?" Silly me. I wasted a huge amount of time getting Vegas to work correctly with MPEG-2 editing to the frame. Looking back, I should have just converted to AVI and saved myself the headache.

However, 5.0d seems much more reliable already. Not only are all the cuts where they should be, but version D recognized the AVI files as widescreen, unlike version C, where I had to specifically tell each AVI shot that it was in widescreen.

Let this be a warning to all who use Vegas 5.0C on MPEG-2 files. Don't do it!